Ahoy Internet! Your Infamous Platypus here. It’s November, and with Kyle’s four week engagement with one of the most beloved horror series of all time at a close, I have returned from the depths of World of Warcraft for another edition of Throwback Thursday.  As with my last installment on Brave Fencer Musashi, the game I’ve chosen to take a look at this time requires some back story. Today, I’ll be taking you back into the days where most people were working on about 512 MB of RAM, EverQuest was still a big deal, and World of Warcraft was still in development.  I’m taking you back to the first Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) I’ve ever played. I’m taking you into the world of Ragnarok Online. 

 

Ragnarok Online, (Or RO as it was commonly called) was a simple pay to play game, developed by South Korean company Gravity Interactive, that utilized 2d sprites in a 3d environment. It was released in North America (as iRO or International Ragnarok Online) and offered the standard MMO fare, job systems, spells, skills, experience and monster battles.  I remember wasting away many hours with friends in this game, but does it hold a candle to today’s MMORPG super powers? Well. . .

 

Plot Characters: 2/10

Plot is where Ragnarok Online falls and fails hard. While other MMORPGs such as Ultima Online and EverQuest were rich with lore, RO worked off of a bare minimum story line, roughly based in Norse myth, which had little to no effect on game play.

 

“Scarred during the dangerous moments in battle, and avoiding total destruction altogether, the Humans, God and Demons entered a long truce…Then one day, strange occurrences started happening, breaking the balance that once existed in Midgard. There came a strange howl from the boundaries that divided the humans, God, and demons; creatures began attacking; increasing earthquakes and hail  and…The mysterious legend of demons…”

~Ragnarok Online

And that’s it. A basic explanation about why and what you’re fighting and off you go.  Characters are barely more diverse.  None of them, not even Migard’s king, let alone your own individual personas, have any personality to speak of , making it very hard to speak of plot and characters while speaking of Ragnarok Online.
There be monsters. Kill them.

 

Sound: 8.5/10

Simply speaking, the music featured in Ragnarok Online is beautiful and diverse. While many tracks share the same relaxing qualities, no two are truly alike and each seeks to portray the area in which it plays to perfection. The Background Music (or BGMs) in Ragnarok Online number at over 100 and include a variety of stlyes, such as techno, jazz, trance, rock and orchestral, according to the game’s website.

There is no voice acting to speak of in the game, and the other sounds are merely that to which the monsters make to warn you of their oncoming onslaught. Still, the music of Ragnarok Online is some of the most beautiful I’ve ever heard. It is certainly the first and only time I can really remember choosing to keep the game’s sound on, rather than overlaying it with my own audio tracks.

Here is an example; the music of Geffen; City of Mages:

Graphics: 5/10

My biased opinion? The graphics for Ragnarok Online were cute. Strictly speaking, they were, and still are, nothing special. The 3D environments are rudimentary and leave much to be desired, even for a game made in the early 2000s. The 2D sprites were, if possible, worse. They were hardly customizable outside of custom head accessories and a few different hair styles and colors. Outfits were based on what class you played, and while some servers allowed you to change the colors of your clothes, the official ones did not at the time I played this game.

And that’s precisely what added to the game’s charm. The graphics were so bad they approached good from the angle of cheek pinchingly adorable.  Characters shuffled around the screen with only as much precision as a flat drawing could shuffle around a 3D Map. Monsters were the same; 2D renditions on a 3D plane.  Ragnarok Online gets half credit here for an attempt at originality, and for appealing to my “Dawww” senses, but the point remains, the graphics were far from stunning.

Gameplay: 6/10

This is a hard one to measure; there are so many things I absolutely loved about this game when it was new to me, but most of those things have been completely blown out of the water by more current MMORPGs, and likely even by others of its time (I would not know, RO was the only one I played.)  First, it deserves noting that Ragnarok Online was not very specific in terms of goals. You had a character, you leveled that character. The game did not give or ‘spoil’ us with extras. There were very few , if any quest lines, and the ones that did exist were only to obtain some sort of custom item. There were no ‘instanced’ dungeons, only different maps to fight monsters.  The gameplay of iRO was based around three things:

1. Levels
2.  Loot
3.  PVP

And for me, at age 14, each of these were enough. Levels were truly a joy to obtain, because of the way the character building system worked. When you started playing Ragnarok Online your character (whose gender was based on the one you entered on your account, you could only choose to play males or females) was a Novice. Novices had no real skills, and had to advance to level 10 before they were allowed to embark on a short quest to obtain their class. You could choose one of six (Warrior, Acolyte, Mage, Thief, Archer, and Merchant). In addition to regular levels, which you use to increase attributes (Such as Strength and Intelligence) you would also receive job levels in one of your classes, which would allow you to choose skills and skill trees to level up as well. As soon as you obtained job level 40, you could choose to ‘evolve’ your character into one of two advanced classes. For example, as a Thief, you could become an Assassin or a Rogue. As a merchant (A class that specializes in selling goods to other players) you could become a blacksmith (an item crafting class) or an alchemist (the summoning class). I spent many a night tracking the best builds for my characters on GameFAQs.com before even starting to play them.

Still, the ultimate point of Ragnarok Online, at least for me, was War of Emperium or WoE, which to this day remains my favorite PVP event in any MMORPG (yes, even World of Warcraft). War of Emperium would occur twice a week, in the evenings. At these times, guilds (a group of players banded together under a common banner) would enter the WoE areas to fight other guilds for control over a series of guild fortresses. In an epic bout of capture the flag, some guilds would be on the offensive, attempting to attack the emperium, a large crystal deep in the guild hall. Other guilds would defend their fortress. Whom so ever ended up on the defending side , successfully defending the emperium by the end of the event would get the keep the guild hall….until the next War of Emperium. These events would draw in crowds from all over the online world, and poor lowbies would know to stay far away from these areas when a War of Emperium was going down.

 

Overall: 5.5/10

From an objective standpoint, Ragnarok Online just doesn’t hold up to the MMORPGs of this era. World of Warcraft, which recently announced its new expansion pack, did everything RO  did better, and then some. Even other MMORPGs of its time were way ahead of the game. Still, the fun times I had while playing can not be rated on a number system, and for that reason alone, I still call Ragnarok Online one of the best MMORPGs.

Tags: Emperium, Gravity, iRO, Jobs, Loki, Migard, MMORPG, Ragnarok, RO, WoE

About the Author

Written by InfaPlat

As an avid writer, gamer, and dungeon master, it would be hard to classify Jessica Lynn as anything but a geek. Her favorite past times involve raining unholy fire upon her enemies, devising the next great way to kill her party, and figuring out just how far she can push a PC before it explodes. When not taking out her nerd rage on fantasy characters or inanimate objects, she can be found toiling away in the dungeon known as the IT department. If you’re wondering; InfaPlat is short for Infamous Platypus.

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Article source: http://www.comicbooked.com/throwback-thursday-13-ragnarok-online/